tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post6797150855655290747..comments2015-08-02T03:10:39.933-04:00Comments on In the Middle: I'll Take My Medieval Studies Flash-Mobbed and Viral and On the Rocks, PleaseJeffrey Cohenhttps://plus.google.com/110433684739546897626noreply@blogger.comBlogger18125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-14899388113354674592012-06-01T13:18:42.973-04:002012-06-01T13:18:42.973-04:00Jinty Nelson, a mentor (mentrix? grammatically cor...Jinty Nelson, a mentor (mentrix? grammatically correct but somehow more of a breath mint than a social position) of mine, once advised me when I was dealing with an article I thought was very badly done and needed to be called out and replaced with a better paradigm, that the most important thing was to be &quot;comradely&quot;. I think kindness as Eileen phrases it is tremendously important: the whole discipline only survives because people give of their free time, help people, do favours, forget things owed or snubs given, forgive early mistakes, encourage, nurture, and in many *many* cases <i>feed</i> people. Seriously: how many times in your penurious graduate years did an established scholar get you lunch? If you resisted this, well done for your independence, but those of us who accepted more shamelessly are even now still trying to pass this, and all the other kindnesses, down the chain to the next generation, perhaps in the hope that somehow the gods will find us worthy to be patrons with a salary rather than well-wishers without, but all the same... It all <i>runs</i> on kindness. BUT its structure is rigour, is that when something is done it is done well enough to be useful (and if possible not hurtful) to others, and that&#39;s why we hit a contradiction here. Sometimes you can&#39;t be kind, and that&#39;s where Jinty&#39;s advice comes in. I have not always managed to follow it, and I regret some of those cases. Not all, but I&#39;d probably regret them all if I met the people affected and remembered that they too are in this same army or endeavour and up against the same threats, more or less, of ridicule, short prospects, economic exclusion and self-doubt. Small wonder some of us give short measure, but even when that needs pointing out... they&#39;re still comrades. What you&#39;ve written here reminds to me remember Jinty&#39;s advice more often.tenthmedievalhttp://tenthmedieval.wordpress.com/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-12012632709413947082012-05-21T16:47:41.716-04:002012-05-21T16:47:41.716-04:00I write reviews fairly frequently, and I sometimes...I write reviews fairly frequently, and I sometimes write negative things in them. I try not to be nasty, and I try very hard indeed never to write reviews that say bad things about the author directly as opposed to saying negative things about particular points of a book or an argument. However, I was once called out as being insufficiently feminist because I wrote a generally negative review of a work of feminist scholarship in a feminist venue. I think that&#39;s a problem too, one that can damage the field in perhaps different ways, but ways just as significant as the practice of writing of toxic, nasty reviews. If we can&#39;t have an honest critical conversation, feminist scholarship would seem to be a very fragile thing indeed. And I think the same might be said for any kind of scholarship. Reviewing should not be a perpetual mutual admiration society, after all. We as scholars disagree, and I think outlining differences in methods, approaches, and interpretations, if done respectfully, is perfectly legitimate in reviews. People certainly have taken issue with, and criticized, aspects of my books in reviews, and while I of course love the reviews that are full of praise, I have no problem with other reviewers&#39; right to criticize and disagree.ntbwhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07473784367469379792noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-13855336867320547812012-05-20T10:02:33.643-04:002012-05-20T10:02:33.643-04:00Thanks, all, for your comments, at Kazoo and here....Thanks, all, for your comments, at Kazoo and here. I wanted to add my 2 cents worth - well, two cents *more*, technically - on the topic of disciplinarity. It seems obvious that our peculiar difficulty lies in the fact that we&#39;re working in the European languages, and it&#39;s especially the European languages that are suffering just now. If you look across the university at other campus units, you&#39;ll find that no other discipline organizes itself as we do, with individual languages hived off into self-contained units; where the scholar studies a single linguistic tradition in isolation; where we are scholars of literature and literature only. In other departments and campus units (Near Eastern Studies or Middle Eastern Studies; African Studies; Asian Studies in their various regional configurations), the scholar is expected to know more than one language (one of them quite well). And historians are not expected to study one aspect of history in isolation - only literature, for instance, or only social history. The historian specializes in a field, but is expected to use multiple archives to situate her/his historical analysis. <br /><br />This, I think, should be food for thought for those of us who work in European traditions - particularly as the old departmental models erode, as departments become ever more presentist, as emphasis shifts to global languages (global English, Spanish and French) rather than the national languages of &quot;old&quot; Europe (farewell, Italian and German!). One could argue that the European Union is making things so interesting for itself these days that we might push for a new departmental configuration on the area studies model (like those departments of Middle Eastern or African Studies) - but the area studies model seems to have been so thoroughly discredited, for various reasons, as to be irredeemable at this historical moment. Yet I yearn for the best of what those departments have: a disciplinary model in which no scholar can be monolingual and in which (for instance) no literary scholar can ignore social history. <br /><br />Certainly, I think that we should exploit what we as pre-modernists have: intimate, affectionate knowledge of a literary tradition *not* grounded in a national language. Because our languages aren&#39;t national languages. In their formation, they are much closer to the cosmopolitan languages of antiquity and the Middle Ages than to the national languages of European modernity. It&#39;s easy to forget that simple fact if you read medieval texts looking forward toward modernity, but that (for all kinds of reasons) would be the wrong way to read medieval texts. <br /><br />This, at least, is my working hypothesis. I wish I knew how to translate it into institutional reform!Korsairhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18042884773257784172noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-27114302798089587842012-05-19T04:35:41.438-04:002012-05-19T04:35:41.438-04:00Or, to go at things from another route: I don&#39;...Or, to go at things from another route: I don&#39;t object to professionalism and professionalization. I don&#39;t object to wanting people to do the work to get things right, and not to waste my time by half-assing what they publish. I don&#39;t object to reviews that point out <i>substantial</i>, important errors. I do object to gatekeeping, to declaring what kinds of work are permissable and what isn&#39;t, and I object to reviews whose tone is: I&#39;m the expert here, and you can&#39;t join my club (which is, basically, how I think I come off in my Boehner review I link to above).<br /><br />But even this doesn&#39;t work perfectly! Still thinking things through.<br /><br />One more thought: In the conclusion to my AVMEO essay, I observe, basically, that no attention can ever attend to everything, and that no community can ever include everything. Kind of a duh point, but I think it&#39;s one that&#39;s often forgotten.<br /><br />One of the things I like about Aelred of Rievaulx&#39;s <i>On Spiritual Friendship,</i> for example, is how it demonstrates both the inclusive and exclusive dynamics of community: its third book, iirc, sees Aelred and a couple of monks conversing while scurrying away from other monks, because they know their little community can&#39;t sustain any more members, or at least it can&#39;t sustain the inclusion of something not simpatico to their intellectual and spiritual project.<br /><br />My calls for community building, then, have to be made with the full knowledge that every community has its borders. We shouldn&#39;t &#39;be nice to everyone&#39;, nor *can* we be.Karl Steelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12440542200843836794noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-89582297888923425162012-05-19T04:35:30.735-04:002012-05-19T04:35:30.735-04:00&quot;McGinn’s theory does not merely bypass the r...&quot;McGinn’s theory does not merely bypass the received wisdom amongst empirically-minded scholars of disgust; it bypasses the received wisdom amongst moms and schoolmarms about basic hygiene.&quot;<br /><br />(it&#39;s thinking like this, I think, that leads to evo-psych explanations of the apparent reproductive advantages of long hair on women--to cite an argument I saw on fb recently--or to empiricist, practical readings of Biblical dietary laws. I&#39;m not in favor.)<br /><br />&quot;The brain &#39;resembles nothing so much as a mound of dung&#39;, a proclamation that forces us to ask whether McGinn has ever actually seen a brain. &#39;The rectum is a grave [obviously!]... but is the grave also a rectum, with corpses featuring as large turds?&#39; These are the questions McGinn is not afraid to ask, not that the answers could be anything other than nonsense.&quot;<br /><br />Setting aside that &quot;obviously!&quot;, which at least suggests an unfamiliarity with Bersani, what can we do with that &quot;could[n&#39;t] be anything other than nonsense&quot;??<br /><br />That&#39;s the tone of the negative review I&#39;m objecting to. I don&#39;t see that there&#39;s a good reason to persist in writing reviews like this. <br /><br />In re: my call to shut down negative reviews entirely. Of course I have to retreat from that, now that I&#39;ve given it some thought, and now that I&#39;ve been pressured. Guy and Eileen are right: what do we do with, well, nasty people with nasty ideas? <br /><br />We have to argue against them. I suppose my problem is with EGO. And even among friends, we should accept and encourage a little grit in the smooth workings of things. This is the simplest lesson we can draw from S. Ahmed&#39;s <i>The Promise of Happiness</i> (a book I just love).Karl Steelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12440542200843836794noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-30923772147814085272012-05-19T04:35:03.955-04:002012-05-19T04:35:03.955-04:00Eileen, sorry to have hijacked (?) your post with ...Eileen, sorry to have hijacked (?) your post with this book review conversation. <br /><br />Since I wrote my comment yesterday, I&#39;ve reëvaluated it a little. I&#39;m really hesitant now about that &#39;treat it like bad student writing&#39; thing, mainly because of the *condescension* of that--let&#39;s pat you, bad book, on the head and say, &#39;good enough, but here&#39;s what I would have done.&#39; Isn&#39;t it better to be disagreed with vigorously, like a peer, rather than gently nudged, like an acolyte? Still thinking it through, and hoping not to end up exactly where I started.<br /><br />Chris: In re: the McGinn Disgust book (might as well name it, so <a href="http://www-personal.umich.edu/~humean/strohmingermcginn.pdf" rel="nofollow">here&#39;s</a> the review; and <a href="http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2011/12/07/review-colin-mcginns-meaning-disgust" rel="nofollow">here&#39;s another one, of a very different sort</a>): one thing is that I didn&#39;t know the context. I didn&#39;t know McGinn was a big-name philosopher, one noted, I&#39;ve since heard, for writing nasty reviews. I didn&#39;t know the reviewer was a postdoc doing a brave or foolish thing in going after a senior scholar who had written a book on disgust while arrogantly ignoring the VERY large body of literature on disgust from the last, oh, 30 or 40 years. There&#39;s something admirable, then, in seeing McGinn called out, if only for the sexism of his jewelry comment. <br /><br />But there&#39;s a kind of empirical reductionist quality to the review that, to my mind, serves as a gatekeeper, barring McGinn and maybe scholarship in general, from speculation, from imagination. Two examples:Karl Steelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12440542200843836794noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-2076903293948550152012-05-18T23:51:01.028-04:002012-05-18T23:51:01.028-04:00Before it becomes somehow ensconced that a list of...Before it becomes somehow ensconced that a list of errata at the end of a review be dismissed with the term “Asshole Paragraph,” please keep in mind that for many responsible, methodical scholars there many good, defensible reasons for publicizing errata: you record corrections in the book (and I’m not just talking about the author here—anyone using the book, even library copies) so that in using the book going forward, basic factual errors/typos are not passed on as the book is used in subsequent scholarship. This is particularly true and valuable for reviews of editions, but it holds true for monographs and essay collections as well. Also, errata are useful for a responsible author in case a work goes into a second edition/reprints and corrections are needed (again, very important for editions and textbooks, for example). My personal practice if I have netted errata in a review is to send them privately to the author rather than include them in a review, if there are only a few; however I think it is completely defensible to publish them more broadly: not to “shame” the author, but to collaboratively make the work as accurate as possible once it becomes part of the public record in published form. If one is silent about errors and then ten, twenty or thirty years down the road, someone is quoting from a book with inaccurate dates or places or translations or names, that’s not very responsible on the part of the reviewer. It may be painful for the author’s ego, but isn’t there a greater responsibility to future generations of the scholarly community? <br /><br />What I’ve said above pertains to the typical small number of errata a reviewer might find; however in those cases where something has gone very, very wrong (and it does happen) with either the press or the author or both, and the work is truly riddled with factual errors (e.g., mistranslations, typos, etc.) doesn’t the scholarly community have a right to know that this may not be a book one can unreservedly recommend to a student or colleague without caution about its content?<br /><br />I know this comment will probably result in my being blasted as an evil reviewer here, not sufficiently collaborative/kind/loving/open/accepting/empathetic/generous, etc., etc. I think there are all sorts of ways to write a bad review and more attention to the form is needed in (for example) graduate school training. But I believe errata have a place, properly expressed.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-2665465347678325642012-05-18T19:36:50.972-04:002012-05-18T19:36:50.972-04:00Oops:
Religion and Literature
See, the mistakes ...Oops:<br /><br />Religion and Literature<br /><br />See, the mistakes just proliferate!Eileen Joyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-45934634253719153702012-05-18T19:36:13.746-04:002012-05-18T19:36:13.746-04:00Anonymous: sorry about the screw-up in the journal...Anonymous: sorry about the screw-up in the journal name; I know it&#39;s Literature and Religion, but sometimes those typing fingers have a mind of their own. It&#39;s a fantastic double-issue, too; Jeffrey plugged it here on the blog when it first came out.<br /><br />Guy: you&#39;ve reminded me of something I was thinking about shortly after the session in which Elaine gave her remarks--I am for the most part against being nasty, period, in reviews or elsewhere, if by &quot;nasty&quot; we mean something like sneering, condescension, and the like, BUT, there are very important times within the so-called academic publishing sphere where writers are putting forth arguments that might actually be filled with hatred, racism, purposefully mangled facts, and the like, and we certainly have to reserve some room to come out strongly against that, and in print [while also being mindful of tone, as you yourself point out]. I&#39;ve often said, among friends, that I&#39;m not against anything except people who are against things. I&#39;ve written a couple of posts myself [especially related to issues of historicism and historiography] where I&#39;ve been a little upset/angry over other people&#39;s views [views that go something like, &quot;I don&#39;t think medievalists have any business doing X,&quot; and such, or &quot;what we need now is the sort of historicism that honors the past&#39;s difference], and I want to argue *strenuously* against that, but hopefully, in the right tone. Every now and then, anger is necessary, but knowing when that is can be awfully hard to tell sometimes.Eileen Joyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-63845685152358273582012-05-18T15:04:11.597-04:002012-05-18T15:04:11.597-04:00Thanks for this post. I hadn&#39;t really thought...Thanks for this post. I hadn&#39;t really thought about &#39;The French of England&#39;, oddly since it has some links with my own institution, but now you mention it, the explanation for the avoidance of Anglo-Norman does seem odd. Surely the &#39;French&#39; of England&#39; eternalises/naturalises the two &#39;nations&#39;, their links with particular territories and the difference between them?<br />On nastiness and reviews, I felt chastened by Elaine, as I have written some bastard reviews in my time. Sometimes I think that most academics are located somewhere on the autism spectrum; sometimes (sometimes? often) I look back and think &#39;Guy, didn&#39;t you realise how that would sound/be read/how the other person might feel? What were you thinking?&#39; In all that I think we (we British blokes from non-genteel backgrounds in non-genteel subjects anyway) need the Elaines of the world to tell us how to behave; not to be such utter shit-heads. <br />Sometimes it&#39;s just that things look harsher in the cold light of print than they were meant to be. <br />Sometimes, mind you, I&#39;m not in the slightest embarrassed. I&#39;ve given negative reviews to books that weren&#39;t (or weren&#39;t just) bad scholarship but were downright offensive in their argument/assumptions/language/treatment of other writers. I don&#39;t feel bad about giving the likes of B. B*chr*ch both barrels. I&#39;m sure I should but I don&#39;t. My bad - as they say.<br />Nor do I feel bad about saying (and blogging) that someone would surely have to be a bit stupid to write a particular sentence/argument and not realise how it read and how it could support nasty racist views of immigration - unless, of course, they actually held such views. That got me into big trouble, but I feel worse that I gave into the naked deployment of cultural and professional capital and removed the post than that I posted it in the first place. Sometimes, especially when cultural capital etc works in particular ways within particular discourses to prevent change (where decades of polite disagreement have made not the slightest jot of difference), one needs to break out of the accepted modes of conversation to make a point stick. I think that point (a punctum if you will) has stuck. Now, you could say that if dialogue was normally more supportive such a breach, such an act, would have more force, would avoid being able to be painted as just the usual rudeness. There might be something in that.Guy Halsallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05776021705072427856noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-38521509803858409652012-05-18T14:55:23.531-04:002012-05-18T14:55:23.531-04:00Karl,
Maybe I&#39;m being naive here, but I don&#...Karl,<br /><br />Maybe I&#39;m being naive here, but I don&#39;t read the review you linked to as being all that nasty. Sure, it could have been phrased a bit more supportively. But I didn&#39;t leave the review thinking that, were I interested in reading on the subject, this would be a toxic book to avoid at all costs, or even a ho-hum book to not waste time with; instead I got information about what the author is doing in this book, and information about what other people are doing in other books that I might also want to read. <br /><br />The review, after all, isn&#39;t being written for the author (even though the author will perhaps be its most devoted reader), but for the reader who wants a summary of and a context for the book. No need for anyone to be a asshole about it -- I loved Treharne&#39;s remark to the effect that medieval studies was simply not important enough to justify anyone being so cruel -- but as a reader I certainly would want some form of your last paragraph to be in a more humane version of reviewing.<br /><br />But not the typo-lambasting Asshole Paragraph; that&#39;s both assholic and a waste of the review-reader&#39;s time.Chrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06700221349311740958noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-36537625503522624932012-05-18T13:31:46.427-04:002012-05-18T13:31:46.427-04:00I&#39;m sorry: It&#39;s
Religion &amp; Literature...I&#39;m sorry: It&#39;s<br /><br />Religion &amp; Literature 42.1-2 (2011)<br />NOT<br />Religion &amp; CultureAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-23508084714689972902012-05-18T11:52:44.129-04:002012-05-18T11:52:44.129-04:00This is such a terrific post, Eileen! I wasn&#39;...This is such a terrific post, Eileen! I wasn&#39;t able to make it to this session, so I appreciate seeing what others have said about the future of the field. I am particularly struck by Elaine&#39;s comments, and I agree with them wholeheartedly. We need more empathy and humanity in the humanities, I think, and we need more community too. I am always enlivened by the sense of community I feel at Kalamazoo that is always then undercut by the tone I see in published work and reviews (both in journals and of my own and others&#39; work). I was probably guilty of this kind of tone earlier in my career, but I really want to work to help this field that we so love to be open, accepting, collaborative, kind, generative, sustainable. I&#39;m on board with any effort that can help make this more of a reality.Josh Eylerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16306739532204569034noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-51741848064102449712012-05-18T06:44:47.331-04:002012-05-18T06:44:47.331-04:00Thanks for bringing Eilaine&#39;s remarks about na...Thanks for bringing Eilaine&#39;s remarks about nastiness in book reviews into this conversation. They were inspirational.<br /><br />The strange thing about the Thursday morning Exemplaria session to Friday morning MEMSI session arc of five sessions is that I felt like we were having a sustained conversation -- a long, intense, sustained examination of the future of medieval and humanities studies.Jeffrey Cohenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-62886957378963822412012-05-18T04:04:04.246-04:002012-05-18T04:04:04.246-04:00One more thought: you know that last bit where the...One more thought: you know that last bit where the reviewer (almost always) sadly lists typos and missing punctuation, that bit that often starts with &quot;no book can escape proofreading errors&quot;? Can we call that the Asshole Paragraph? Because, seriously, why do we need it? To me it just says: hey, jerks, look how closely I read this book. It&#39;s like greeting a job candidate by telling her she has a stain on her jacket. Let&#39;s have a moratorium on such paragraphs, okay?Karl Steelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12440542200843836794noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-18501298436255639192012-05-18T03:40:16.331-04:002012-05-18T03:40:16.331-04:00THANKS!
Man oh MAN do I wish I had been at Kzoo. ...THANKS!<br /><br />Man oh MAN do I wish I had been at Kzoo. And in Paris, too, but also in Kzoo.<br /><br />Just this morning, in re: Treharne, I was skimming reviews in the latest issue of JEGP and I thought &quot;nasty reviews are a reminder who&#39;s standing in the way of a better medieval studies,&quot; to which I added, rapidly, &quot;this goes for my nasty reviews too.&quot; (and, Bruce Boehrer, if you&#39;re reading this: <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/full/10.1086/660472" rel="nofollow">I&#39;m sorry</a>).<br /><br />The wide distribution, on fb and, to a lesser extent, twitter, of a nasty review of a recent book on disgust just appalls me, in part because I laughed at it the first time I read it. Not linking to it, by the way. This raises a larger question for those of us who review books more or less frequently: what should we do when a bad book crosses our path? I think the most <i>generous</i> and <i>community building</i> approach is, obviously, not to shut it down, and certainly not to puff up our ego by bullying it, but rather to determine <i>what the book wanted to do</i> and to help those insights along. In other words, when we review a book we can&#39;t admire, perhaps we can treat it like we would the striving-but-perhaps-incomplete work of our students? And we can treat it as we would in a world in which each medievalist, each scholar, is a precious, fragile thing (seriously!) in a world that doesn&#39;t value scholarship. We can write not as if we&#39;re going to be showing off for our peers, but rather write as if we&#39;re having a drink, or having coffee, with the writer, among friends.Karl Steelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12440542200843836794noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-44004718881663807802012-05-18T00:11:27.671-04:002012-05-18T00:11:27.671-04:00And when I write about thinking of ourselves as mu...And when I write about thinking of ourselves as multiaskers I don&#39;t mean we&#39;re back to where we started, when we all work in isolation. This posting gives so many great examples of what happens when we all put our heads together, and what I was trying to suggest is how the transdisciplinary endeavors we launch with others can and will *also* inform what we do as individuals.Jonathan Hsynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-26037980569603265412012-05-17T23:31:56.929-04:002012-05-17T23:31:56.929-04:00Thank you Eileen for these copious, detailed notes...Thank you Eileen for these copious, detailed notes (and your imbedded responses within them). Wow. I wish my flight had arrived earlier so I could have attended this one!<br /><br />It won&#39;t come as a surprise to people who know my work that I *couldn&#39;t agree more* with this discussion of multilingualism and transnational studies here - and that we should attend to intermediary &quot;fixers&quot; in medieval society, and flow of languages and cultures already-always in motion. I&#39;ve admired Karla Mallette&#39;s work for quite some time and must say she&#39;s right on the money: we need to think of languages beyond any &quot;mono&quot; linguistic perspective and remain an orientation that is always-already across tongues. You&#39;re right to note that people like Karla and others in Mediterranean studies have been at the forefront in this regard, and I&#39;d just like to add that North Sea studies - as well as work on the medieval Atlantic - increasingly conspires with Mediterranean studies (so to speak), showing how transnational/lingual flow throughout an interconnected space/network can inform diverse modes of literary analysis.<br /><br />The challenge for literature scholars, I think, is to sustain analyses that attend to local linguistic features (i.e. philology) *while also* pursuing what you provisionally call &quot;rhizomatic&quot; modes of interconnectivity with other disciplines and domains of knowledge. Doing this is easier said than done. Collaboration is, I believe, one way for this to happen - but I also hope that we can can all be more open to considering *ourselves* as multitaskers, finding ways to ground our own readings in local philological rigor *while also* engaging with global/theoretical frames. Yes, in this regard, theory (in my view, a marriage of postcolonial theory and sociolinguistics) could be the way to go. I could say more but I&#39;ll stop right now - people who want to know more about what I have to say about this can read my book when it comes out! [shameless plug, I know - LOL]Jonathan Hsyhttp://departments.columbian.gwu.edu/english/people/128noreply@blogger.com